Sonnet 14: November ends

For a while there it looked as if I wasn’t going to make my sonnet quota this year, but here’s the last one, just ahead of deadline. I was tossing up whether to write about my increasing deafness, or Yoko Ono’s exhibition at the MCA, or the way Eleanor Caron’s Booker prize-winning novel The Luminaries is getting so little promotion in the end-of-year lists in newspapers and bookshop reading guides. I settled for this:

Sonnet 14: November ends
I shopped, I read, I went to movies,
played with children, watched TV,
rode a train with weary juvies,
helped add a show to P’s CV,
stood in rain for climate action,
faced computer death distraction,
ruminated on the news,
tried to formulate some views:
all grist for my November rhyming
fourteen lines in Pushkin’s ways,
fourteen times in thirty days.
An hour to spare – precision timing –
I’ve got them done. Perhaps next year
the form of Petrarch, or Shakespeare.

6 responses to “Sonnet 14: November ends”

Just to-night Sydney friends to dinner – early Christmas presents to my wife – and me – CARON’s Luminaries! Last week I went to the MCA. For the Yoko ONO Exhibition. Intelligent challenges! My wife and I in June of 1976 in Khabarovsk attended the Pushkin Theatre Company on tour from Moscow. Resonances galore in your final sonnet entry and note. Thanks!

The play is bonkers, but in a good way. Pamela Rabe, Colin Friels and Toby Schmidt are all brilliant. The set (by genius Brian Thomson), lighting design (Matthew Scott), and sound design (Paul Charlier) all remarkable. What Are we to make of the moment when Toby Schmidt's character pulls off his false moustache? Photo by Daniel Boud from Belvoir site.

We found this pleasant surprise on Netflix. It's an Australian sitcom about panicky young women, a little in the manner of Offspring, The Letdown or that one where every man the woman had sex with died. Here. a Nobel laureate admits that he has donated his own sperm to many cases of in vitro fertilisation, and as a result his adult daughter discovers sh […]